I sometimes think that the things in my head that don’t want to come out are the most dangerous. Things that stay lurking in musty corners of my mind for years. Sometimes decades. That can’t be good, right? God only knows what twisted mutations happen in the darkest corners of a troubled mind.

This thought, the one I’m chasing with you now, is a real crafty old bugger. One minute it’s a ghost then a lie then a fantasy. It’s there though – I can see the empty spaces that it leaves in the process of its concealment. I can notice the missing joy and peace and energy that it uses to power its invisibility motors.

Can one catch a thought with a thought? Perhaps I’m being too ambitious – maybe I should just throw likely words in the general direction of the gaps in my mind and see what sticks? Words like shame and guilt and waste and ….. denial.

Fuck I just saw the ghost of my mother. The hole in my mind, the hole in my soul, is in the shape of my mother. My mother is ancient. Older than anyone should be made to be. She’s been that way since I’ve known her. There’s always been a feeling of primal misery and decay about her. It was once covered in young fresh skin and now it’s covered in sagging wrinkled tissue thin skin. There’s something frighteningly timeless, almost vital, about her decrepitude. An endless fuck you in the face of innocence, beauty, youth and joy.

An endless capacity for incapacity – a problem for every solution. That’s me old mum for you. Even the best of her days are endless, horrid and grey.

What’s that? Why does this bother me so? It’s hardly my fault is it? Just ignore her and she’ll go away. But don’t you know the saddest ghosts live the longest.

I left my job in the city to engage in a spot of ghostbusting. Just in case it would help the endless proliferation of symptoms. Help fight the anxiety, the despair, the addiction, confusion, anger, lostness, lack. Told myself, wouldn’t it be nice to spend some quality time with mum while she’s still healthy enough to hang with. Go for walks, have some lovely little chats.

Fuck. Was my capacity for self deceit so strong? Now there are two sources of endless darkness in my life. My mother and my mother’s ghost. The Mother, the Son and the Unholy ghost. What a clusterfuck.

Well I can’t rightly leave us here in this mess. It’s not a fertile mess – just a merry bit of madness. And, believe me I’ve tried, there’s nothing to be done with the woman herself. She’s oblivious. Her misery and darkness impenetrable.

All I can do is align myself with lighter beings, brighter beings. Be a lighter and brighter being myself. Be a channel for the light and love of god or, if the g-word offends, of the Universal Mind. No good carrying candles into a black hole. I’ve spent my life smashing my serenity – bouncing against the implacable event horizon of mother’s misery.

I’ve been wanting to have a drink today. No problem you say, what’s your poison? Oh I’m not fussy really, a Black Label or a Castle. Or an Amstel. And a pill or two. Just a few milligrams. Of codeine or diazapam or, for good measure both. Well that can’t be hard. Certainly not the codeine bit – what about an adcodol or myprodol? I suppose I could rustle up a valium or ativan too at a pinch.

Of course you know I can’t. In fact even, my imaginary sponsor might say, thinking about it too much is not a good idea. Because it’s never just one or two is it? Well, that’s not exactly true. Two or three beers at most and two adcodol and I’ll be fine. I’ll be able to write, do some art, read a bit then, later, sleep like a baby. I’ll probably even have those really vivid dreams just like I used to. Perhaps the ones where I flap my arms and start to fly.

On my way home I was trying to hold some quite delicate thoughts and emotions in my brain. So I could sit here and download them onto my laptop. Capture them, without killing them, for the sake of science. But I think they seeped out into the general noise and dirt of late evening ennui.

You asked if I were trying to protect you and I think I said that to protect our fragile intersubjective space I would have to protect you too. That to protect our relationship we have to protect ourselves and eachother. Because things are so much easier to break than they are to put back together. Said that the ephemeral things, the fragile things need to be protected the most. Even though the armies of chaos will win the war there is some dignity in the battle for coherence, for innocence. For beauty.

Perhaps I have become just a bit depressed. A bit oppressed by thoughts of cold dirty puddles, rusty benches, cancer growing quietly in a million oblivious bodies. And I’m seeing some really sad aspects of us. Of this space. This process. And I know you want to go there with me but I don’t want to infect the fragile infant space that we share. Because I have gone down that route and it never turns out well.

People are not drugs. Even though loneliness is the disease, company is not the cure. My loneliness could eat a fair sized stadium of bright and innocent well wishers and still wonder about what to choose for the main course. I can’t feel the heat and the light of your sun if I let the darkness out. If I let you in.

I have my imaginary sponsor to deal with that shit. He says sit with the feeling. So I’m sitting with it. And writing about it. And waiting for the cold tide of terror to ebb. Waiting for my little spot in the sun to come back so I can breathe a bit easier and do my bit to be a source of good instead of an ambassador of pain and decay.

I may be getting a bit manic I said, giggling nervously and thinking of the next 50 things that I absolutely had to say in the next 7 minutes. What makes you think that? Well I did sleep a good 8 hours – over the last three days. And have been blogging like a demon, solving the meaning of life and planning to sell about a decade’s worth of art for small change.

Why do you think it’s happening?

That’s refreshing. The official script reads – “Have you been taking your pills?”
Look, far be it from to condone neurochemically irresponsible behaviour. I would love it if we all could chill. But the thing is some of us can’t – I can’t. Perhaps there is a chemical solution to the condition that is called David. But having just timidly exited a 37 year long experiment in sublimating sorrow with chemical potions I don’t think it’s possible.

I’m sorry to do this to you!
Do what?

Well it can’t be easy. Yesterday I’m all sunshine and rainbows and butterflies then today I’m down in the dumps. Did you say it’s ok. Or perhaps let’s discuss it. My brain has lost Terabytes of information since then. I can’t remember my dreams on your couch and I can’t remember you in my dreams.

It can be unsettling. You meet me and I’m happy and charming and energetic. Then next thing it’s tears, misery, sulleness, aggression.

Was that how it was for your girlfriends?
For some of them.
Is that how it is for you?

I’m not sure. I think alcohol and codeine made it less painful for me. Did fuckall for my significant others though. I’m getting a taste of my own medicine now – being stuck in an abusive relationship with myself – without the fuzzy distant feeling. That wonderful warm fuzzy distant feeling.

Perhaps it’s a form of sublimation? The mania that’s coming on. Sliding seductively closer – like a fucking out of control freight train.

I’m looking at the artificial orchid that I thought had magical powers for 3 months. Wanting to look at you. Your eyes have magical powers. Don’t they? Don’t tell me there’s no such thing as magic.

You’re fired
You’re joking
Perhaps I am

I can sublimate libido, turn my desire into silver words but how do I sublimate sorrow? Without drugs. Without sex. Without madness.
Time is up. Time is always up. Suicide is easy, god is dead and time is up.

I live at the intersection of The World and My Brain. It’s a really horrible area and I often dream of moving. Anywhere. But I can’t. It seems that by the time the world reaches me it has already been shredded and reassembled as pastiche. I reach myself along a similar route. Is there any other way?

Recently I fell off the production line. I thought, hey don’t stress, I’m a good product. That nice lady with the pink hair and brown teeth will pick me up, put me back in a free slot, and things will be as right as rain in no time at all. But she didn’t, did she? She deemed me faulty, broken, scrap. And next thing I know I’m down the chute, through the flap and landing unceremoniously in the garbage ready to be taken to the dump. Down in the dumps am I now. It’s shocking. How it happened so quickly. And finally. An obedient and productive product with satellite TV and beer in the fridge one day and an obsolete extraneous shadow the next.

I carried a couch down to the intersection. It was once a proud new couch that lived in a suburban duplex. It’s become a bit tatty. Frayed around the edges. Is coated in a layer that was once dust but has now fused with the fabric of the couch. There are years of dust and dirt that have fused with the fabric of my mind so I feel a certain tenderness towards the silly old couch. And in any case it’s my bed now. Which I made and now lie in it. The artist formally known as Dave on the dusty couch just a few feet from a very busy intersection. Bowie and now Prince. Fuck. That’s a lot of unsayable stuff for me right there.

I told my Doctor that I don’t do much punctuation these days. Just tumble down the stream of consciousness with no time for semicolons. She has a couch with lots of fluffy pillows and some really neat plastic at the foot end so I don’t even need to take off my shoes. She has a room that has no dust. I think it’s a holy room so the dust just kinda stays away. Out of respect. I sometimes cut from her wooly dentist’s couch to my sad entropically compromised couch at the intersection. This is called a hard cut in the trade. And it is. Like when a soft pink finger meets a sullen rusty blade.

When I’m on her couch I don’t feel like a product. I know I’m there for a serious operation but I feel so ….. human, perhaps. She cuts into me so slowly, so tenderly, as if her scalpels are made of silk. And she doesn’t even mind the blood. It’s literal blood. I mean a stream of bloody words, that she collects and studies. I think she’s investigating antidotes. Or perhaps making a huge installation that needs lots of different shades and types of blood. There is nothing even vaguely vampirical about her though. She has a transcendental beauty about her. It’s a beauty that soothes while she cuts. There is something the opposite of beauty that cuts when it soothes but I haven’t given it a name.

Hush now baby, baby, don’t you cry.
Mother’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true.
Mother’s gonna put all of her fears into you.

Next to my couch, at the intersection, I have an old compact disc player stereo cassette recorder. That’s actually what you will see when the camera zooms in. Sometimes the music supervisor likes to combine sound and visuals in evocative ways. I’ll be thinking about S…..n but hearing So long Marianne. Or you’ll see me on the couch in the rain being covered slowly by a layer of soot and dust and hear There was joy there was fun. The music director trades in Blasphemous rumours and, yes, does have a sick sense of humour.

I told the Doctor that I regress at the drop of a hat. She wanted to know if my father wore a hat. I do love her but she has the silliest notions. She suffers from Pareidolia. A particularly nasty Freudian strain of the bug. I think she knows this but bears her burden with dignity. Being a spiritual burden it does not affect her posture. The editor removes thoughts that are bad for my blood but sometimes a saucy allusion gets through. He, the editor, trades in allusions. Arranges them rhythmically and sometimes allows them to copulate but only just under the surface.

I have several conflicting operating systems and they’re all full of bugs. Not just bugs but years of malicious code too. Sometimes when I get to temporally or psychologically close to saying the unsayable my system crashes or freezes. At times like these I console myself with knowing that one day I will be able to leave. There is an Urban Security Specialist who walks the beat past my couch everyday. He reminds me that No one here gets out alive. I call him Jim. I say, ok Jim, but the sweet water of death will take me to the sea. I dream of returning to the sea. Mother gave me sugar water when I bumped my head but that’s not pertinent here at all.

The Producer wants me to wrap this up. It’s a pity because I don’t have much to do today besides talking to pigeons and picking at scabs. There was something I wanted to say though. An unsayable thing become horribly important. Fuck. It’s gone. It’s hiding under an endless accretion of dusty words. I see people everywhere and I sometimes sob because I fear that some of them may be as lost as me. As scared and confused and lonely and cold as me. And I’m worried that the movie will end on this sour note and will be a flop. Will be unwatchable. That’s is a very real fear – that the movie of my life will be unwatchable, book unreadable, series cancelled.